Me likely.
Back to eating pizza from Rosati’s in Scottsdale.
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Monthly Archives: November 2006
This is brilliant! A great way to reach people who are likely to a)have an iPod and b)have little or no experience making a turkey dinner. If I were cooking on Thanksgiving, I would definitely try this out. Though I feel some sympathy for the people who are working the Butterball turkey hotline…from Clickz:
By updating the means of sharing Turkey techniques, Butterball hopes to reach out to a younger generation of consumers, according to Toni Kackert, marketing manager for Butterball Turkey.“The consumers that are actually podcasting are the ones that are either now, or will in the next few years, start cooking our turkeys. A lot of them are first time turkey preparers, so we wanted to help them and we thought podcasts would be the way,” says Kackert. “Maybe they don’t have time to call the TurkeyTalk line, but they can subscribe to the podcast and download it to their iPod and maybe look at it when they are in the store.”
[Butterball.com via Clickz]
Offline responsibilities will take me away from online musings for the next few days. Meanwhile, enjoy some of the best sites for political coverage:
Good luck to all of us.
–Jim
It’s a nail-biting time to be in the news business (hasn’t it always been that way?). A Poynter analyst notes that recently released circulation numbers for US papers are actually worse than they appear.
Now Wired reports on Gannett’s imminent new strategy to “crowdsource” the news gathering and analysis functions of flagship title USA Today and 90 other papers nationally. Company leaders swear it’s not about cutting costs – they say it’s about leveraging the resources of their readers, and creating a community of information:
The initiative emphasizes four goals: Prioritize local news over national news; publish more user-generated content; become 24-7 news operations, in which the newspapers do less and the websites do much more; and finally, use crowdsourcing methods to put readers to work as watchdogs, whistle-blowers and researchers in large, investigative features.
“This is a huge restructuring for us,” said Michael Maness, the VP for strategic planning of news and one of the chief architects of the project. According to an e-mail sent Thursday to Gannett news staff by CEO Craig Dubow, the restructuring has been tested in 11 locations throughout the United States, but will be in place throughout all of Gannett’s newspapers by May. “Implementing the (Information) Center quickly is essential. Our industry is changing in ways that create great opportunity for Gannett.”
The early-adopter half of my brain is excited by this – it seems like a smart way to acknowledge how media and technology has really leveled the playing field for access to information as well as the ability to find a platform to communicate.
And yet, the old-school journalism side of my brain thinks this is really silly – it will be a cost-cutting move eventually…and it negates the need to have well-funded investigative journalism keeping watch over our policymakers.
It is too early to say if this is a good thing or not. This much is clear – newspapers need to keep changing if they are to remain relevant to their audiences.
It’s not often (if ever, actually) that I would just glom something onto this site after reading a blog post elsewhere, but this just seems like a no-brainer (and I love the look of the flags). Amit Agarwal says:
Since more than 65% of web users speak a language other than English, it is essential that you provide language translation features in your blog so that you don’t miss the non-English speaking traffic.
So when an Arabic visitor passes your English blog, he or she can just click the Arab flag to translate the website into his native language - That way you don’t loose a visitor plus he could even subscribe if the content is good even if written in another language.
More about language issues and the web, courtesy of the United Nations.
